Hi Rosemary,

We selectively implemented shelfready, leaving out the areas where our classification was so divergent from standard that we feel we would have to reclassify first. We are prioritising reclassification in these areas. 

Where our local practice didn't diverge too far from standard, and we think reclassification may be desirable but is not urgent or essential for the implementation of shelfready, we have gone ahead with shelfready orders where possible, and at the same time we've used standard modern classification for material obtained in other ways.   We have temporarily had to suspend shelfready for other reasons, but when we can resume, we'll add in the areas where we have upgraded local LC to standard modern LC.

We've also considered this alongside collection management trends for particular subjects. As I think someone mentioned last week, some subject material becomes outdated relatively quickly and is discarded. It may not seem worth reclassifying this, but we've found this idea hard to sell to customer support staff and library users, especially if earlier editions remain on the shelves at different numbers.

The ordering process became more complicated for our Acquisitions team members, but we did find that the other benefits outweighed this. We did have some difficulties with one supplier who preferred at the time to deal with orders which were 100% shelfready. We can't do that, because there are some subject areas where we cannot accept standard modern classification yet. 


Most academic responses to reclassification seem to be positive so far, probably because we can promise greater specificity than our local modifications could deliver, in the case of law and Moys, and a faster availability of books at peak times with reclassification aimed at facilitating shelfready. 

We have found that some local modifications, which were insisted upon by a previous generation of academics, have no value at all for today's academics, who have experienced standard classification at other libraries and prefer it  

   Jackie 

 

Jackie Sumner 
Acquisitions & Metadata Support Team Manager
Main Library
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham B15 2TT
 
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-----Original Message-----
From: CIG E-Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Rosemary Stenson
Sent: 26 September 2011 13:42
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CIG-E-FORUM] Reclassification projects

Several years ago we undertook a medium sized reclassification project when the local college of higer education merged with the University. 
Their academic stock was to be merged with main library stock. They were using Dewey, we have an in-house classification scheme based on LC. 

We had just over a year to have the stock reclassified (and relabelled) before the physical merger took place. Added complications were that they were physically remote from us, they used US MARC and we at this time were still using UK MARC, and they continued to use a different LMS for about 6 months and so changes had to be made on both systems during this period.

We tackled this by doing a survey of their stock and of the quality of the MARC records in their database. They had about 40,000 physical volumes represented by about 25,000+ unique bib records. Outsourcing was not an option for us as we had a non-standard classification scheme. We considered different approaches but eventually decided on the following:

We tackled the project by printing off the MARC records in batches: 

1. The lists were checked and for material which was duplicated in the main library, we added their copy to our record, annotated the print-out with the shelf-mark, sent it to the college library who printed the label and reshelved the books in a new sequence. This represented about 1/3 of the stock. 

2. For material which we didn't have but for which we had or could obtain an LC class no, this was passed to classifiers who either used the exisiting record and upgraded it, or more frequently downloaded another record from RLUK/OCLC, classified the item according to the LC no, and followed the above method for labelling etc.

3. For material for which we could not obtain a record or which proved difficult to classify remotely, we had the physical items sent to the main library. Fortunately we found that this affected only a very small number of books ; less than 5%.

We managed to finish the project ahead of schedule and with only 1 additional classifier (from the college library) ; 2 additional basic grade cataloguers were allocated for the last 6 months (we were also involved in 4 RSLP projects at the same time). Part of the reason we managed it on time was because we did it in the main without cataloguers having to handle the physical items so we did not have stock moving around the building. I also agree with others that in fact the physical processing of the books took longer in most cases than the assigning of the classification and record upgrade. Dedicated senior cataloguers handled all of the re-classification work, cataloguing assistants handled the work which did not require classification and the labelling was done by college library staff who were not cataloguers.



Over the years we have considered moving from our in-house classification to LC. This obviously would have great advantages for us in terms of reducing cataloguing staff, taking advantage of shelf-ready books, as well as in other areas such as data analysis of our stock, etc. However there was great resistance to this by subject librarians and other library staff. I would be really interested to hear from other large academic libraries who have undertaken this and how they approached it. Did they only apply the new classification to new stock, or to new stock + a selection of existing stock, how did they manage the project, the relabelling, and the logistics? How did this go down with library staff, academic staff and users?

Regards

Rosemary Stenson
Head of Cataloguing

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